E Plurbus Unum
by roisaber
Summary: When Rick's right, he's right. Unity and Beta 7 have no lasting potential as an Item. Unity takes this opportunity to reflect on her consciousness and the meaning of individuality.


[AUTHOR] Oh man I should add this - SPOILERS FOR SE2EP3 wubba dubba dub dub!

Arguing with Beta 7 was tricky work, drunk.

Four of Unity's bodies, three female, one male, stood in a non-descript kitchen in a non-descript apartment in a non-descript city somewhere on the surface of Beta 7's nominal homeworld, Etrenak VI. All four of them were blue-skinned humanoids, of varying sizes, weights, and eye colors. All four of them were also drunk. Beta 7 was too, trying to drown his sense of imminent despair by sousing all forty eight million of his bodies in vodka. Every liquor store on the planet was now totally empty, but that was a problem for another day. Today, all he could think of was saying something, anything, that would prevent Unity from leaving him.

"Damn it!" one of Beta 7's almost indistinguishable clones cried, choking back a sob. "Why, Unity? What do I have to do to get you to stay?"

"I don't want to stay," all four of Unity's immediately present bodies responded in unison.

"But we're so good together," Beta 7 retorted, sniffing.

In a sense, it was true. All over the surface of the planet, the teeming millions of bodies each of them possessed was somehow entangled in the other. Some were struggling with the problem of curing Space AIDS; some were sharing the last of the planet's nearly-empty liquor bottles; and some, Unity realized with a faint niggling of irritation, were still actually having sex. She put a stop to that immediately. Though a human would find controlling so many minds and bodies simultaneously to be a totally impossible task, her species had evolved through countless generations until the sensation was effortless, as easy as a lesser being might find raising a hand. Or claw, or tenticle. Unity began dressing her errant bodies. Though in some cases they were better left undressed - she couldn't find an outfit of the appropraite size to clothe the giraffe she'd assimilated at Rick's insitence, but she'd found using its body to bring her a burst of perversely experimental delight. Unity vacillated. She'd made her decision, but putting it into practice would require more willpower than the hive mind typically had to exercise.

Across Etrenak VI, all thirty two million of her bodies took a deep breath, and sighed simultaneously.

"I'm leaving you, Beta 7. Please don't ruin what we had by trying to hold on to it when it's time to let it go," Unity breathed.

Several of Beta 7's bodies started sobbing, and even the ones putting on a brave face looked like they might burst into tears at any moment.

"But where will you go?" he demanded.

This was a poser. For so long, she'd been travelling from world to world, assimilating races and then disgarding them whenever her whim had been satisfied. But if the human Rick brought out the worst in her, what Beta 7 brought out was... bad enough. Life with him over the past four months had been perfect, routine, and secure. He'd even applied to join the Galactic Federation, the most thoroughly responsible and respectable career move a species could pursue.

But somehow it just wasn't enough.

If Rick challenged her to get more indolent by the hour, Beta 7 didn't challenge her at all. He asked nothing of her and accepted whatever she offered. Staying with him was a quick ticket to an eternity of being a respectable socialite on a cosmic scale. And though she had to admit to herself that it was a tempting possibility, it was not a tantalizing one. Somewhere inside her millions and millions of selves, she had a dark void that was always in search of something more. Suddenly, a thought occured to her. It was a thought that she'd never before experienced in her thousands of years of life floating from species to species.

"I want to be alone," she said.

Beta 7 looked aghast. "Alone?"

"Yes. Alone."

Beta 7 crumpled. He wasn't a bad entelechy. Holding Unity against her will was something that never would have occured to him. He started to speak, and then stopped. It was clear that she had her mind made up.

"I want to be _really_ alone," she said, startling him.

"What do you mean?" he finally asked tentatively.

Unity took another deep breath and looked out of (almost) sixty four million eyes. Like some kind of hyper-evolved bee, or housefly, her consciousness seamlessly resolved the millions and millions of images into a single coherent whole upon which she had no trouble acting. Then she made a decision. One by one, she deintegrated her mind from the minds of her constituent elements. Each one winked out like a star, its body returned to its owner.

"Please, keep them from hurting each other," she implored to Beta 7. "You've seen how some of them act without supervision."

Beta 7 nodded. He would assimilate her teeming millions into himself. To do otherwise would be a cruelty that his sense of _noblesse oblige_ simply refused to tolerate. He would bear the burden for her, and maybe some day, she'd come back to thank him for it. But even as he considered the possibility it seemed to recede from him. More and more of Unity's bodies released, until suddenly there was just a single member standing in front of him, the core of her consciousness materializing in a Unity body waiting at the hangar of Etrenank's spaceport, out in the vast parking lot that contained tens of thousands of spaceworthy vessels, waiting for an owner to claim them.

"You won't reconsider?" another body asked, this one a former Unity assimilated now into Beta 7.

"No."

Her answer was firm, but not unfriendly. Not knowing what else to do, Beta 7 leaned forward and gave her an awkward hug. Unity's last body boarded the UFO without even casting him a backwards glance.

Unity's body was well-familiar with the standardized controls on the vessel, and with a few quick keystrokes and tilts on the accelerator the ship roared to life and shoved its way out of Etrenank's atmosphere. She was in the black now. For the first time in more centuries than she could immediately reckon, she was alone. Truly alone. She discovered her body sweating of its own accord, staining the pits of the female's blouse with fragrant perspiration. She tried to force the body's heart rate back to normal and was surprised to discover she couldn't. In a way, a single body was much more difficult to control than teeming millions, and a frown crossed her face. She realized belatedly that she was crying.

With nothing else to do, and trapped in the comfort of her own company, she gave in and allowed herself to have a good, long cry. As usual, running into Rick had made a mess of her life. She'd slept through her own attempted ascendancy to the Federation, shacked up with another hive entelechy like she'd sworn she'd never again do, and now here she was, running off into deep space with a single body and no plan for the future. She laughed at herself between her choking sobs.

When she was finally a respectable distance from the dazzling star Etrenank, Unity reversed the thrust of her vessel until she was in an idle orbit around the galactic core. Here she could contemplate for as long as needs be in an orbit that would last hundreds of millions of years before bringing her back around to its beginning. The sphere of the heavens was such a dazzling darkness. She reproached herself for visiting it so rarely. When you had millions and millions of bodies, everything settled into a routine. You ate, drank, shit, pissed, fucked, screamed, and cried all at the same time. The only thing you never did was sleep. An unconscious body was just that, unconscious, and any attempt to perturb it would only make it awaken. The core of the galaxy slung lazily overhead, and Unity drank in the profundity of the evermost light.

For hours she spun there, saying nothing, thinking nothing. It had been so long since she'd only inhabited a single body, not since her infancy as a protogenic hive mind spawned unconsciously from the depths of a black hole. It had taken her many millions of years before her prototypical consciousness had come across an inhabited world, and then dozens before she could possess a single body, let alone millions. By Rick's reckoning, the gestation of Unity's species was long, unthinkably long. Returning to a single body was like returning to infancy, and Unity was astonished to discover how pleasant the sensation could be. She laughed, playing with her fingers like a little child. For the first time in aeons everything was a marvel again.

She ate, she drank, she pissed, she shat. To do it all again just once at a time was an arresting sensation. To be conscious was a marvel of marvels in all the infinite void.

Slowly, tentatively, a new sensation crawled over her. It was frightening and Unity had no idea what to make of it. She checked her instrument panel, but the ship's sensors reported nothing out of the ordinary. CO2 levels were normal. CO1 levels were normal. Tetrodotoxin levels were normal. But still, the disquieting sense of vertigo grew in intensity, like she might fall off the edge of a cliff at any moment. She checked the artificial gravity which reported normal, and then she checked it again, disbelievingly. After the third consecutive check it still reported normal and Unity feared she might be going insane. Darkness fell over her field of vision and she shook her head and snapped out of it. But moments later, the sensation was back, and stronger this time. With a growing sense of panic Unity realized that she wouldn't be able to hold it off, and she was far away - far too far away - from any other species to assimilate before the sensation overtook her. Unity knew she was dying.

For the first time in untold aeons, Unity fell asleep.

For the first time in untold aeons, Unity dreamed.


End file.
